The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  Did he see the large paper bag beneath the sniper’s window?

  “I never saw the rifle bag,” Craig admitted, “and I was one of the first to arrive when that area was discovered. It just wasn’t there. I could not have overlooked it if it was in there.”

  According to Craig, the rifle was hidden between stacks of boxes in the northwest corner of the sixth floor, near the back stairway entrance. “Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone was the first to discover the rifle. I was about eight feet from him. And I rushed over and looked over the boxes down in the middle where there was an opening and there was a rifle lying down there with the bolt facing upward. I could see the scope. Capt. Will Fritz and the identification man from the city of Dallas then came over. The identification man lifted the rifle out by the strap, pulled the bolt back, and a live round came out of the chamber. The rifle was then taken downstairs and that’s the last I saw of it.

  “I felt then and I still feel now that the weapon was a 7.65 German Mauser and not the 6.5 Carcano the Commission says it was. I was there. I saw it when it was first pulled from its hiding place, and I am not alone in describing it as a Mauser.”

  What about Harry Weatherford being on the roof of the County Records Building?

  “This came about after all the confusion was over with and the investigation was continuing, but I had withdrawn somewhat from it. Harry and I were talking on the front steps of the Records Building and I told him how windy it was, and just general conversation, and he said he didn’t get to see the motorcade or anything because he was on the roof of the Records Building. Decker had put him up there with a rifle, supposedly for security reasons. And he liked to frozed to death because it was so windy up there and it was kind of cold that day. And that was the end of the conversation. Harry just left and went back in the Sheriff’s Office. But it was casual and involuntary on his part. He just brought it up and told me about it.”

  Craig was yawning. I looked at the clock. Had three hours really passed?

  Minutes later, we were heading west on Elm Street on our way back to my hotel. The traffic lights were with us, and Craig was talking about Arnold Rowland. “Why would a young kid like that make up a story about seeing two men on the sixth floor? There comes a point when you have to start believing what some of these people saw. They can’t all be wrong.”

  It was perhaps this thought-provoking line that caused his defenses to relax. Almost as if it had dropped from the sky, a Dallas Police cruiser appeared on Craig’s rear bumper, lights flashing and siren sounding. Craig had been caught.

  We pulled to the curb. Two big and well-armed officers approached Craig’s window and asked for his driver’s license. After glancing at it, they headed back to their car. In a moment, they were again hovering over the driver’s-side door.

  “Do you know why we stopped you?” one of them asked.

  “No sir,” Craig replied.

  “You went through a red light back there,” the officer snapped.

  We had done no such thing. By coincidence, I had been glancing at street signs as we traveled down Elm, closely watching for the corner of Elm and Murphy, where Oswald had boarded a bus after the assassination. The traffic lights were positioned within the same line of sight as the intersection markings. I knew that the previous light had been emerald green as we passed.

  “That’s not right, officer,” I blurted out in Craig’s defense. “That light was definitely green.”

  Both officers leaned down for a better look. Craig grabbed my forearm with his right hand and squeezed tightly. It was too late.

  One of the officers walked around the front of the car and came up to my window. “Got identification?” he barked.

  I fumbled with my wallet and handed him my Pennsylvania driver’s license.

  “What are you doing in Dallas?” he asked.

  I hesitated for a moment, then told him I was here visiting friends.

  “Is that right?” he persisted. It was an I-think-not kind of question.

  After jotting my name down on his notepad, the officer threw the license into my lap and walked back to his partner. Both stood near the front bumper, talking softly and occasionally glancing through the windshield at us.

  “We’re going to let it go this time,” one then said to Craig. “Don’t let it happen again.” He turned his eyes my way, perhaps expecting me to comment. By now I had learned my lesson.

  We pulled away. Craig loudly sucked in some fresh air, then slowly let it out. He was quiet the rest of the way. The encounter had clearly disturbed him. After he dropped me off, I watched his taillights recede in the distance. I expected to see a car move out after him, but none did.

  Then I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me.

  “Craig has got to be more careful,” Jones said when I called him later that night. “He’s lucky you were with him. They wouldn’t do anything with someone else around. And you’re going to have to be careful as well, because if they didn’t have your name already from you snooping around, they sure have it by now.”

  I double-locked my hotel-room door that night. Thanks, Penn.

  CHAPTER 12

  August 1968

  By the time the Kennedy motorcade entered Dealey Plaza, J. C. Price had made his way to the roof of the Terminal Annex building, where he worked. From that vantage point, he had an overhead, unobstructed view of Elm Street, two short blocks away. “I saw one man run towards the passenger cars on the railroad siding after the volley of shots,” Price told the Sheriff’s Department later that day.1 “This man had a white dress shirt, no tie and khaki colored trousers. His hair appeared to be long and dark and his agility running could be about 25 yrs of age. He had something in his hand. I couldn’t be sure but it may have been a head piece.”

  Price “was on the roof watching the parade, heard the shot, and saw President Kennedy slump over,” the FBI wrote two days later, on November 24. “He assumed the shot had come from the overpass and looked in that direction, but saw nothing pertinent.”2 There was no mention of a fleeing man.

  Two years later, in a filmed interview with Mark Lane, Price reverted to what he had told the Sheriff’s Department, adding that the man he saw was “about 145 pounds in weight and not too tall.” He continued, “I’d say five-six or seven. He was bareheaded, and he was running very fast.”3

  As to the “head piece,” Price now said it “could have been a gun.”4

  Why wasn’t any of this in his FBI statement?

  “Actually, I started to tell the agents about the man I saw,” Price told me over the phone one day, “but they just didn’t seem interested. They were only concerned with where I thought the shots had come from, and as soon as I said over near the underpass, they ended the interview.5

  “By the time the FBI got to me,” he continued, “it was the end of the weekend and it was pretty much on the TV that Oswald was the only assassin, and that he had been firing from the Depository building over there. So when the FBI dropped their interest in what I was saying about the man I saw, I figured what I had seen wasn’t important at all. Maybe some spectator or something.”

  The fleeing man hardly fit a spectator’s profile.

  “He distinctly looked like he was running away from something,” Price said, “unlike those who seemed to be running towards something, if you know what I mean. He looked like he was trying . . . well . . . to escape, looking back over his shoulders as he ran and everything. He wasn’t acting like any spectator.”

  I asked about the “head piece.”

  “It appeared to be some kind of radio device,” Price said, “like a walkie-talkie or something. That’s what it looked like to me anyway.”

  When I asked why he told Lane it may have been a gun, Price explained. “I told him what I just told you: it looked like some kind of a radio device. Lane said to me, ‘Could it have been a gun?’ I could tell he was kind of pushing me to say that. And I said, ‘I guess it could have been.’ But it really looked like a
radio device to me. If it was a gun, and I honestly don’t believe it was, then it certainly wasn’t as long as any rifle.”

  Near the end of our brief conversation, I inquired if Price would be kind enough to show me the view he had from the roof. “I’d be happy to. Stop by around noon tomorrow.”

  It was his next line that was the stunner.

  “And don’t forget your checkbook.”

  He hung up. Moments later, so did I.

  I didn’t bother going to see him the next day.

  “He was a highly excitable man—highly excitable.” Wes Wise, a reporter for KRLD-TV in Dallas, was describing for me his former friend, Jack Ruby. At boxing matches, Wise explained, “if Ruby did not like the decision, he went over to the press table and seemed to be agitated and seemed to have a quick temper and would say, ‘You think that was an awful decision, Wes?’ and, ‘Wasn’t that a terrible way they gave that decision to so-and-so?,’ who would usually be the fighter that he probably had not put money on or was not in favor of.6

  “He was the kind who liked to hang around with the police and the law people and the radio and TV people and was pretty well liked. As I’ve often said, if I had been in the basement of the City Hall, the Dallas police station, waiting for Oswald to be put into the wagon to be taken to County Jail and Jack Ruby had been standing right next to me, I would have turned and said, ‘Hello, Jack,’ or ‘How you doing, Jack?’ or something like that. I would have thought it was not unusual his being there because he was on the scene so much.”

  What caused me to look up Wise was the fact that he had noticed Ruby in Dealey Plaza on Saturday, November 23. That’s not so strange, when one recalls that many migrated to that spot that weekend. But Ruby’s appearance may have been beyond paying homage to a slain president.

  “This was the day after the assassination,” Wise explained, “at sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon or something like that, which of course was the day before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  Wise said he was on assignment to film the route taken the day before by Oswald from downtown to the Texas Theatre. He was sitting in a mobile news unit parked against a police barricade along the east side of the Depository. “Jack Ruby came running up and knocked on the window. And I rolled the window down, more or less annoyed at his disturbing me as I was trying to make transmission with the station, and [he] said something to the effect of, ‘Wasn’t it a terrible thing that had happened?’ and, ‘Wasn’t it awful that the kids were going to be without . . . a father?’ And I said, you know, I agreed with him that it was an awful thing. And I detected a sign of tears in his eyes. He didn’t actually weep or anything like that. But there were, I thought, tears in his eyes.7 And he pointed out to me that Will Fritz and Chief of Police Curry were over on the assassination site . . . in front of the School Book Depository building, in case I wanted to shoot pictures of them. And I thanked him for informing me of this; I hadn’t seen them. And with that, I said goodbye to him.”

  Ruby approached him “from back in the direction of the railroad yards,” Wise stated. “I remember this very briefly, for a moment, that it seemed sort of strange that he was coming from back there, because all of the activity, all of the crowd, was around in front of the building.”

  Ruby claimed he went to Dealey Plaza that Saturday to observe the many sympathy wreaths placed on the grassy knoll.8 There are indications, however, that Ruby may have been there to stalk Oswald, who was initially scheduled to be transferred to the county jail in Dealey Plaza that afternoon.

  The idea of Ruby plotting Oswald’s murder in advance did not sit well with the Warren Commission, which felt more comfortable with the idea that Ruby committed the act not only alone, but strictly on impulse.

  Garnett Hallmark, an attendant at Nichols Brothers Parking Garage, said Ruby drove in that Saturday and parked his car in his usual spot. He then walked into Hallmark’s office to use the phone. Hallmark said:

  He was—he told this person who he had established as being Ken, that he had been to the city hall and was following this thing, and he had information to the effect that the transfer was to take place that afternoon. I got the impression that he had some information and possibly wanted corroboration. In other words, he just was not 100 percent sure, but he had—he thought he knew that the thing was to take place then, but was not 100 percent sure. Then, he remarked that people started strewing flowers at the scene of the assassination, which is in the immediate locale of the county jail, so that possibly because of the congestion they would not transfer Oswald that afternoon.9

  Ruby neglected to mention his Saturday visit to Dealey Plaza in an otherwise detailed chronology of his weekend activities furnished to his lawyers prior to trial. He also failed to tell the FBI about it during a lengthy jailhouse interview on December 21, 1963.10

  But Saturday was not the first time Ruby gave indications of shadowing Oswald. He was also seen, notebook in hand and acting like a reporter, at Dallas Police headquarters Friday night when Oswald was paraded to a news conference.11

  Dallas Police Officer D. V. Harkness saw Ruby that Saturday too.

  Belin: What did you do on Saturday?

  Harkness: Saturday I was assigned to traffic at Elm and Houston, between Elm and Main.

  Belin: Is there anything else that you did on Saturday or on Sunday that might in any way be relevant to this area of inquiry?

  Harkness: On Saturday had a large crowd down there, and I observed Jack Ruby at the entrance of the jail down there on Saturday.

  Belin: You saw Jack Ruby near the entrance of the jail on Saturday?

  Harkness: Yes sir.

  Belin: Has your statement already been taken by anyone before on the President’s Commission?

  Harkness: Yes sir.

  Belin: But you did see Jack Ruby?

  Harkness: I testified in Ruby’s trial to that effect.12

  Belin: Anyone else or anything else that might be in any way relevant here?13

  Wasn’t it “relevant” that Ruby, who twenty-four hours later would shoot Oswald in a similar situation and environment, was hovering over this earlier planned transfer?

  If it didn’t seem to warrant further questioning on Belin’s part, this oddity certainly did stick in Harkness’s mind. In response to Belin’s concluding request for any other noteworthy information, the officer explained that, while on a family outing that following Sunday and after hearing on the radio that Oswald had been shot, he immediately telephoned Captain Fritz to report he had seen Ruby during the planned Saturday transfer.

  The fact that Harkness thought his earlier sighting of Ruby was suspicious enough to call it to the attention of his boss still did not pique Belin.

  Belin: Anything else?

  Harkness: That is all.14

  Officer Harkness was dismissed.

  So why was Ruby in Dealey Plaza? “I really don’t know,” Wise told me during our interview. “He said he came to look at the wreaths and flowers, and I believe he did do that. But I don’t feel that was his real reason. I think he came because of the scheduled Oswald transfer . . . for whatever reason.”15

  The Still-Missing Miss Adams

  In the background of everything I was doing lingered my search for the still-missing Victoria Adams. On my first trip to Dallas, I had found nothing. No one knew about her. She had left her job. There were no telephone records. The address she had provided to the Warren Commission on April 7, 1964—4906 Wenonah—proved fruitless. She no longer lived there, and no one knew where she went.

  But I had uncovered some new clues at the National Archives. During an interview with the FBI on November 24, 1963, Miss Adams had provided an address of 3651 Fontana Street. Although this was not her most current residence—Wenonah coming later—perhaps someone there knew of her current whereabouts.

  Again, I had no such luck.

  Then on February 17, 1964, when she was questioned by J. R. Leavelle of the Dallas Police, she gave her address as 3909 Cole
, Apartment D. My taxi driver had trouble finding it, but when he did, no one there had a clue about her either. This woman had literally disappeared.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I asked when I revisited Roy Truly at the Depository one morning. I didn’t expect him to remember me. But he did and immediately rose from his desk to shake my hand.

  I explained that I was looking for someone who had once worked in his building. Her former employer had been unable to assist me. As superintendent of the Depository, could he help, perhaps casually ask a few questions about her?

  “I’ll do what I can,” he replied. I gave him my hotel phone number. He assured me he would call, one way or the other.

  Truly was true to his word. That evening he telephoned to report he had found nothing. All he was able to determine was that Miss Adams had left her job unexpectedly and had not provided a forwarding address. She could still be in Dallas, or thousands of miles away. Truly did not know.

  And neither did I.

  Late on one of my last evenings, when very few others were around and business offices had all closed, I walked behind the Depository. I climbed the loading-dock steps to the back door, the one Miss Adams and Miss Styles had used. Clicking my stopwatch, I retraced their steps, as closely as possible to what Miss Adams had described doing: walking west just shy of the railroad yards, pausing as I recited under my breath the words she testified were used with the policemen she met there, walking down the west side of the building toward Elm Street, turning east, and heading back to the Depository’s front steps.

  I repeated this route five times. It took me anywhere from four minutes forty-three seconds to five minutes eighteen seconds. This fit with what Miss Adams had told the FBI on November 24, 1963: “She did estimate that the time between her departure from the building and her return to the building was about four or five minutes.”16

  Then I did some backpedaling. The shooting occurred at 12:30 P.M. Miss Adams testified it was somewhere between fifteen and thirty seconds after she heard the final shot that she left the fourth-floor window. She estimated she spent about one minute getting from her office window to the first floor. Allowing a few moments for when she said she spoke to William Shelley and the time it took to get to the back door, Miss Adams’ timing would have put her outside by about 12:32 P.M.